Venice Film Festival celebrates Jubilee

　　The new range of proposals and restorations from the Secret history of Italian cinema 4 of the 64th Venice Film Festival will be dedicated to the Spaghetti Westerns and it will organized in collaboration with Telecom Progetto Italia. This is the ideal continuation of the work on the Secret history of Italian cinema started in 2004, which has in the past four years successfully relaunched the recovery of invisible Italian films, alongside the parallel initiatives of the Secret history of Asian cinema in 2005 and the Secret history of Russian cinema in 2006. The Secret History of Italian Cinema 4 - Spaghetti Westerns programme will be curated by Marco Giusti and Manlio Gomarasca, with L’Officina Filmclub (Paolo Luciani and Cristina Torelli), in collaboration with leading Italian and foreign scholars of films of this genre. It will include the screening of 40 feature films during the 64th Venice Film Festival, selected on the basis of the relationship between great importance and high degree of ‘invisibility’: films that have not been in circulation for at least a decade, and are here restored and reconstructed in their integral version. As for the first edition of the Secret History of Italian Cinema in 2004, the “godfather” of this initiative will be the great American film-maker, Quentin Tarantino, a profound connoisseur and admirer of Italian cinema. Alongside Tarantino, directors, producers, actors, script-writers, photographic directors and stuntmen featuring on prominent Spaghetti Westerns, will also be present in Venice.

　　To celebrate the 75 years of the Festival, two shorts directed by Antonello Sarno will be realised for the 2007 Film Festival: VENEZIA 75, produced by Medusa film and the Istituto Luce, in collaboration with RaiSat and RaiTeche, and ENRICO LXXV Lucherini a Venezia, produced by Medusa film, in collaboration with RaiTeche, constituting a homage to a great figure in Italian cinema, born on the second day of screening during the first edition of the Festival. VENEZIA 75, a short lasting about 15 minutes, will also use sound recordings of the period. Starting with the extraordinary speech with which Conte Volpi di Misurata declared the event open, and including exceptional interviews effected from the 1950s onwards, as well as the thanks for the many Golden Lions, the film also includes the “glamour” of the stars on the beach (ever since 1932!), and the “sacred” rite of the photocall. ENRICO LXXV, a short lasting 20 minutes, is dedicated to Enrico Lucherini, practically a twin brother of the Festival itself, as he was born on 8th August 1932, just 36 hours after the first screening on the Lido: like the Festival, he is 75 years old, but certainly doesn’t show it. The Sindacato Nazionale Giornalisti Cinematografici Italiani (Italian Film Journalists’ Union) will award the “2007 Pietro Bianchi Prize” to Lucherini at the 64th Venice Film Festival. Lucherini has been a protagonist with the unique ability to turn the vitality of cinema and showbiz into news: thus inventing a journalistic style that has now become such a popular cinematographic genre.

　　The information concerning the complete progamme for the 64th Venice Film Festival will be made public after the official presentation planned for the end of July.

　　Venice/Cannes, 22 May 2007